Terminally Incoherent

Comment notifications are not working. Or rather they are working but with like a 48 hour delay. So if there was a comment posted today, you may get it Wednesday or something like that. And there is nothing I can do about it. Or rather nothing short term - long term solution is to switch hosts naturally. Dreamhost doesn’t seem to be able to figure out how to run a fucking SMTP server.

They had the same exact problem like a month or two ago, and apparently they haven’t really fixed it cause it is back only worse this time. I swear, I can’t win with these guys. Do not host with them - seriously!

In the meantime I recommend using a service like Co.mments.com to keep track of the discussion threads on your favorite dreamhost hosted blogs. I routinely use it for blogs that do not offer email notifications at all. You don’t get notifications instantly the way it is with email, but it’s better than nothing.

I’ve been running this blog on a 7 day schedule for quite a while now. I pretty much got it down to science, cranking out posts out on time. Recently though I noticed that this self imposed schedule started becoming tiresome. Weekdays are usually fine, but since my weekends tend to be hectic I’m sometime struggling to get these posts out. Obviously this schedule doesn’t work for me anymore. So I decided to decrease my posting frequency a bit to give me some space to breathe.

I’m officially cutting the Sunday posts for now. 6 days a week is still a tight schedule and I may need to drop it down to 5 at some point but not yet. I don’t think I will ever need to go below 5. Hopefully this slight drop in frequency will result in improved quality (ie. more proofreading for example).

Why am I posting this? Because if I don’t I will keep trying to make the 7 day schedule. If it’s out there in writing, I won’t feel guilty for skipping out on a day.

tl;dr version: no more posts on Sunday

As an appeasement offering I leave you with the “Near Death Experiences” sketch by Picnicface:

This one has became like a local meme recently. I don’t think I will ever be able to watch any show or a movie dealing with near death experience with a straight face.

You might have noticed that I stopped using the hreview format, and the 5 star scoring system for my reviews. I don’t know if you miss that part, but I decided to drop them. Why? Well, part of the reason is something that Shamus said in his blog really struck a chord with me. I can’t find the exact link at the moment, but he basically said that putting scores on reviews is completely meaningless and futile exercise which doesn’t really add any value to the review itself. I agree with that. To me, a review should be more of a more or less an objective in-depth discussion of the product in question, rather than arbitrary “awesome” or “lame” score.

In fact, the score is usually the most subjective part of the review - that’s the part where you make a judgment without any quantitative support. Or rather, the review should be a support for the score, but it is not always the case. I noticed that my personal scoring system had really no structure or guidelines. I would award stars based on how I felt that day, not based on how good was the object I reviewed. I went back to the archives and I noticed many discrepancies. For example I gave “End of Evangelion” a score of 4 because at the time I thought it was awesome and deserved a high score but I didn’t think it was absolutely perfect. So a 4 seemed right. Then at some other time I was reviewing some silly comedy and gave it a 3.5 because I thought it was a bit above the average. According to my scoring system the difference between an excellent, thought provoking anime that made my head spin for days and a forgettable average comedy was exactly half a star. WTF?

Naturally I went back and adjusted the scores so the End of Evangelion reviews are now at 5 stars, but this whole exercise made me realize how completely arbitrary this system was. And it’s not just me - I was flipping through the PC Gamer the other day and I noticed exactly the same issue in their reviewing system. What exactly is the difference between the score of 89% and 91%? You’d think that on a 100% spread this would be a completely insignificant minor difference, making the games almost equivalent in quality. But if you read the reviews the 89% is essentially a “great idea, very poor execution” review while the 91% is a “best game evar, but has few tiny bugs you can fix with a patch” one. You hardly ever see reviews that hand out scores below 50% anyway - the game must be incredibly bad for that. And yet you would think that statistically most of the games should score in the average 20-80 bracket with only few exceptional pieces lading in the top and bottom 20%. But if you look back through the issues, you will notice a completely different distribution - most games score above 80. Horrible games score just below 60. No one ever gets the score of 0% despite the fact that someone out there surely deserves it.

So it is a conceptual problem - review scores do not work. Shamus was right, and I was using a faulty model all this time. Hell, I can’t believe it took me so long to figure this out. Needless to say, I’m not going to use these arbitrary scoring methods anymore. If you liked them, let me know in the comments, but I doubt that I will bring them back.

Speaking of PC Gamer and video game reviews (and this is something that Shamus touched upon several times in his blog) I noticed that most of magazines on the market hardly do them anymore. If you flip open a random video game magazine these days, most of the volume is taken up by 4 page “exclusive previews” of new games which are usually nothing more than just thinly veiled press releases handed down from the distributors. Actual reviews are crammed in the back of the magazine, usually accompanied by as single thumbnail screenshot and score box, and spliced in a “4 reviews per page” grid.

I really feel it should be the opposite way - a review of a game should be 4 page long, with in-depth discussion of the gameplay, storyline and screenshots taken by the reviewers themselves depicting actual gameplay, menus and amusing graphical bugs and glitches they were able to find. Sadly, the only people who do this sort of thing these days are independent bloggers who get no money out of the whole thing. It seems that anyone making money out of game reviews (and this includes popular blogs) becomes a “previewer” concerned more with generating hype for a given game, than actually writing critical reviews. Sigh…

If you were trying to send me an email yesterday you might have received a nice returned mail transcript. That’s because I fucked up the MX record when “outsourcing” my mail to Google Apps. Since Dreamhost is having major issues relaying their emails to Google I was annoyed that I can’t use my Gmail to get my comment confirmations. The pleasant, but not very effective folks from DH tech support group recommended that using Google Apps will let me keep the Gmail interface, solve the issue of delayed comment confirmations (at least for me, not necessarily for the commenters) and help them by easing the load on the Gmail forward queue.

So I went and signed app for the Apps account, set it up and then set up a custom MX record pointing to aspmx.l.google.com via Dreamhost’s CPanel. Only I fucked it up.

Now, usually when you are trying to transfer an important piece of information from one text box to another without typos, you copy and paste. You pretty much can’t go wrong with pasting, unless of course you mess up the crucial step of HIGHLIGHTING the text to be copied. It should be easy, right? Apparently not. My MX ended up pointing to aspmx.l.google.co. If you don’t notice the difference, look again. I ate the m in .com.

As the result all the email set to me was going directly into the void. Sigh… I just can’t win.

If you were sending me an email, and getting bounced all day please keep trying or send it to my gmail address. That one works normally - only the @terminally-incoherent.com address was affected by my apparent inability to copy and paste properly.

It may take up to 48 hours for the records to propagate all over the internets. Knowing my luck it will take exactly 48 hours and not a second less. Anyways, what I’m trying to say that my email might be funky for the next day or two. Use the gmail account if you need to contact me.

Quick note for those of you who use Gmail and rely on the comment subscription thingymajig to follow the discussions around here. There seems to be some weird bottleneck when relaying emails to gmail accounts, which seems to be affecting the comment subscription system. If you haven’t received any comment notifications today blame Dreamhogs. I was wondering why my email is being so quiet today. There was not a single notification message in my inbox today.

I sent Dreamhost an email, but they are pretty much like:

I don’t have a clue how long will this persist. I’m hoping it will get cleared by tomorrow, but who knows. I’ll keep you updated. If you are not using Gmail, you will probably be unaffected by this. If you are not on Gmail and you are not getting any notifications, let me know, and I’ll go and yell at Dremroast some more.